M.P. Shiel
Matthew Phipps Shiel (1865-1947), was born July 21, 1865, in Montserrat, West Indies. His father,
a ship-owner, shopkeeper, and lay Methodist preacher had laid claim to the small rocky Leeward island of Redonda, of which
his son was crowned king on his 15th birthday. Beginning to write at 11, Shiel was educated in Barbados, then London,
England. Shiel spoke seven languages and served as an interpreter before trying his hand at medicine and teaching
mathematics. Shiel was an active man, jogging six miles a day into his 70s and practicing mountaineering and
yoga. Married twice, Shiel was "an eager womanizer" fathering several illegitimate children. Impressed at an early
age by the works of Edgar Allen Poe, and given his knowledge of many languages, Shiel's poetic prose was
idiosyncratically unique, being compared by some to improvisational jazz, by others to stylistic sound effects. Shiel
has been accused by some of anti-Semitism, but others suggest he used the racist views of his time as a literary device
to ultimately discredit racism an expound his own peculiar belief system. Towards the end of his life Shiel
adopted an anti-Christian stance based on scientific knowledge over hope ("ignorance") and completed an analysis
and retelling of the Gospel of Matthew. Several of his works toy with eugenics and the Nietzschean übermensch
concept, though the latter under a communal rather than individualistic form, and not as something inherent in a
race or creed, but rather a status achieved through learning. During his life Shiel wrote 25 novels and
numerous short-stories, the best of which he produced between 1895 and 1905. These include
Prince Zaleski (1895), Shapes of Fire (1896), Cold Steel (1899), Contraband of War (1899),
The Purple Cloud (1901) and Lord of the Sea. Shiel died on February 17, 1947, at a hospital in Chichester.

This recent (2002) collection of Shieliana, subtitled "A Collection of Primary Documents Including Shiel's Letters to August Derleth 1929-1946" collects letters from Shiel to August Derleth, co-founder of Arkham House, and material from the correspondance of H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and others where Shiel is mentioned. Of all the material by or about Shiel that I have read amongst the material reviewed here, it is these letters which gave me the best impression of the sort of person Shiel was. His encouraging, instructive and sometimes critical comments on the stories Derleth had sent to him show him as a polite and generous older man, distinctly British in character. While some of the later letters might suggest that Shiel, then in his 80s, was plagued with a failing memory, they remain interesting in terms of who the otherwise mysterious M.P. Shiel was.

The Rajah's Sapphire and The New King

Also included in the materials I received are a 1981 reprint of Shiel's first novel The Rajah's Sapphire (1896) and his last, posthumous novel The New King. The first, a tale of mystery and intrigue, is photo-offset from the original edition. While not a bad little novel, derived as it is from a story told Shiel vivâ voce by W.T. Stead, long-time editor of the Review of Reviews and other periodicals of the time, it has little of Shiel's pyrotechnic prose or his imaginative flair. An essay by John D. Squires, "The Curious Tale of Shiel, Stead and the Sapphire, details the circumstances under which the novel was produced and the current events which may have inspired it. The New King (1980), a tale set in a Balkan-like kingdom, presents a battle for the throne between the intellectual "good guy" legitimate heir and the nasty usurper. It has wonderful idiosyncratic Shiel prose, and while the plot is a bit tangled and obscure, it is an interesting and quite unique read. These things are pointed out by A. Reynolds Morse in his
introduction. This volume also includes a portion of the title Cummings King Monk story from The Pale Ape and Other Pulses (1911) which was edited out between the manuscript and book versions. This text, a philosophical musing on such things as whether molecules have souls, is interesting, particularly in it's exposition of Shiel's unconventional theological views.

Georges Dodds is a research scientist in vegetable crop physiology, who for close to 25 years has
read and collected close to 2000 titles of predominantly pre-1950 science-fiction and fantasy, both
in English and French. He writes columns on early imaginative literature for WARP,
the newsletter/fanzine of the
Montreal Science Fiction and Fantasy Association
and maintains a site reflecting his tastes in imaginative literature.